What We Believe Isn’t Important
How you treat others is all that matters
I grew up Christian and rebelled as an atheist. In high school, I identified myself as Republican. In college, I joined team Democrat (though technically I’m unregistered) I’ve meditated with Buddhist monks and meditated as an atheist. I’ve traveled and sampled faiths like a buffet to see if something would stick.
From the ages of 17–25, my life was an ideology-seeking identity crisis. After all of this, it finally hit me.
What We Believe Is Not That Big of a Deal
What can be almost anything. You can believe in a personal God, several Gods, or a giant tentacle monster made of discount-rack neon green paint.
How is what matters. How your beliefs guide you to exist in the world. The degree to which you believe in respecting other people. Your beliefs only matter to the degree that they guide positive actions.
Anyone can believe anything. Believing is a quintessential human experience. There’s nothing spectacular about what you happen to believe other than the fact that you believe it!
“You have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – and because the three of them have different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference. They haven’t allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, ‘We are the chosen group, and we have God.’”
-Joseph Campbell
Your beliefs only matter to the degree that they cause you to act with respect and dignity, and see yourself as part of a human whole rather than an in-group surrounded by sinners and enemies.
That is where their importance ends.
Belief is an act of community, a way of relating to the world that is arrived at through experience. That’s all. Your beliefs are not gospel. They don’t need to be pushed on anyone else. They work for you because they come from your in-group and your cobwebby, dark-cornered mind.
Beliefs Follow a Predictable Equation:
Your experience in the world+whatever has given you positive reinforcement-whatever has given you negative reinforcement=your beliefs.
The largest factor in why you believe whatever you believe is because of or despite the humans that you spend time around.
For the first 18 years of my life, I was a Christian, because I grew up around Christians. They were my in-group. When I started rebelling, I was an atheist despite my in-group.
I ran from Christianity when I realized that my in-group created an out-group of most of the world. I was required to see certain groups of people as “other” in my upbringing, so I ran as far as I could the other way. That wasn’t the answer. All that ended up doing was creating a personal “other” out of the people in my former community.
Beliefs, in a toxic environment, can be a placeholder for social status. A community member or parent sets the stage by saying, “If you believe x and y, I will give you the love you crave.” This sets us up for a lifetime of being terrified to question beliefs. But beliefs need to be questioned.
Questioning Your Beliefs Makes You Stronger
The tricky thing about belief is that if you desperately want to believe something, there is a good chance that you will. The mind warps the world to accommodate even the craziest of beliefs if the social benefit is there.
Just take a look at any conspiracy Reddit thread or QAnon. You see people believing the nuttiest things they can imagine, at a social cost of themselves (from the wider world) because their in-group is rewarding them for believing it.
You must question the beliefs that you grew up with. In western culture, we grow up believing that the more money we have, the happier we will be. We believe that if we can just reach out and get the things we want, we will finally be happy. We believe that if we are able to work hard enough, then we will make ourselves successful, by ourselves. We believe that success is an island.
How is that working out for us? Look around.
All of this B.S. is untrue and harmful to real human truths, like the fact that we are community-minded animals who live and die by our ability to work together. In the modern world, we’ve completely forgotten that.
If you are able to settle your mind and attempt to help the world as a self-aware human being, you can find fulfillment. If you believe that success means grabbing as much cash as you can and sitting on it like a dragon, you are not going to do much good. You will be miserable.
Belief is the most powerful human force. It’s how we built society, created art, and invented the modern world. But now, rather than harness it to create a common human story and solve our problems, we use it for petty squabbling about Gods and the creation of in-groups that drive us farther from our human brothers and sisters.
Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, called an obsession with your community’s beliefs at the cost of other people being “lost in the metaphor.”
“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”
-Joseph Campbell
Can’t we opt out of that cycle? It’s not one or the other. The answer is each other.
Your beliefs deserve humility. They aren’t gospel, they are a byproduct of your community and the way your brain functions. And they are not more important than any person or group of people.
The more room that’s taken up in your head by well-trod systems of thought, the less room there is for you to think for yourself. In other words, the more ism’s you are, the less you are.
Questioning your beliefs makes them (and you) stronger if done honestly. It also gives you the potential to make way more new friends!
Isn’t real, honest cultural exchange better than sitting in an echo chamber?
Enjoyed the article and believe the core message of being kind and having a positive purpose to others. I also agree we should question our beliefs. My outcome was different. My questions about the faith I grew up with made those beliefs “mine” and not being a product of the environment. A person’s faith and good deeds can and do coexist. In fact it’s at the heart of Christianity. The rotten part is that people are people...humans with hard and selfish hearts. Thanks for the article.
Yes. You’ve evolved 100% beyond organized religion. I too have a similar drop-off point because community becomes cultish and a clear hierarchy determined by gender. Your point about questioning belief and finding oneself -that’s where the “religion “ fails. Because it’s not just rules, it’s being kind and loving and adding to the beauty of life.